Ubuntu BOSS: the mobile market still has a chance

Canonical's ambitious plan to spread its vast tulinux territory to devices such as smartphones and tablets. Now, Canonical wants to win the hearts of developers so that they can develop applications that are essential for the success of this platform. However, considering that some old mobile operating system providers have great advantages in the market, this company has some homework to do. To interest developers, the company will make full use of its existing ecosystem and expand its software development kit (SDK ). Canonic

Canonical is ambitious to include its Ubuntu Linux footprint on smartphones, tablets, and other devices. Now, Canonical wants to win the hearts of developers so that they can develop applications that are essential for the success of this platform. However, considering that some old mobile operating system providers have great advantages in the market, this company has some homework to do.

To interest developers, the company will make full use of its existing ecosystem and expand its software development kit (SDK ). Peter Goodall, Project Manager of Canonical's product strategy department, said: "basically applications are driving the platform. Today we do have a huge developer ecosystem. But we also realized that we need to increase development efforts ." The Canonical developer portal has provided a set of instructions and APIs for development; its MyApps portal meets the requirements of some commercial software developers who want to upload developed applications to the company's software center. Relevant guidelines will be provided in the future so that developers can design the architecture of applications running on different types of devices in the future.

Goodall said: "One aspect of this move means that Ubuntu will be able to run on many devices of different sizes in the future, which expands the coverage for developers ." He said the company is also planning to make it easy for developers to sell mobile apps and not to implement annoying restrictions like apple does.

But Aaron Hillegass, president of Big Nerd Ranch, who developed mobile applications, has seen Linux initiatives in the mobile field before. He stressed the need for a practical ecosystem. "Canonical announced that it provides a mobile operating system that everyone can use. This is not enough-why Apple's iOS platform is so popular is that its entire ecosystem: operating systems, hardware devices, iTunes stores, iCloud, and iTunes applications. If Ubuntu has such an ecosystem one day, we will develop applications for it and provide relevant training and consulting services to our customers ."

Jeffrey Hammond, an analyst at the Forrester research company, said that Ubuntu should first win the hearts of hardware manufacturers to win the hearts of developers. He said there was a steep slope to climb in front of Canonical, and the slope became steep. "At the moment, developers have many platforms available on the market-thousands of iPad and thousands of Windows 8 tablets next year. Unless Canonical can win around 5 million flat computers on the market, I don't think developers are very interested in their efforts. They also need a reasonable monetization model so that developers can sell their applications directly to users. Apple has a reasonable monetization model, and Amazon is also doing well in this regard ."

Canonical recently said that in the next two years, the company will adjust and change Linux to make it run smoothly on a variety of systems from smartphones and tablets to televisions and automobiles. Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Canonical, admitted that the market is fiercely competitive. He said there are still opportunities because the market is "very dynamic ". When asked whether several device manufacturers are competing to create devices for the planned Ubuntu Linux upgrade, Goodall said that the company found that many manufacturers expressed great interest, we are discussing with some manufacturers.